Google Buys Urchin Web Analytics

sho222 writes "Business Week, BMP Today, and others are reporting that Google agreed late Monday to aqcuire Urchin Software Corporation. Urchin boasts that their web analytics and marketing intelligence software is used by millions of sites worldwide and 20% of Fortune 500 companies. Google's VP of Product Management explains that, "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products." The deal is set to close in late April."

Comments

Re:This is pretty exciting.

[lucabrasi999]

In addition to being the penultimate search engine

Google is the next to last search engine?

Re:I do love google

[tquinlan]

It's not far too confused, you just don't know the proper place to start your searches:

search.yahoo.com

Nice and clean, easy to use.

Re:Urchin Rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing it didn't have (last time I evaluated these tools) was a way of distributing credit among multiple advertising programs.

For example, one thing we noticed is that paid search engine terms did *MUCH* better in cities where we also did radio advertising.

As far as I can tell, when counting ROI for search engine terms, Urchin would count the entire purchase to even though most of the money that contributed to those purchases may have been spent in radio.

It's a nice simple tool; but except for the pretty pictures you can get more value from building your own data warehouse in mysql or postgresql and writing your own reports.

Not all that significant

[bradleyland]

I'd venture that if you look at the bot referrer log for most sites, Googlebot is at or near the top most of the time. That's just a simple screenshot reflecting what's likely in a production environment.

Will they do something about the bloat?

[nathan s]

I run a few websites on a managed dedicated server and one of the tools that we're offered is Urchin (version 5, I believe). I generally use awstats instead. Urchin is painfully slow to use and has the most horrible date-range system for reports that I've ever had the misfortune to use.

I wonder if Google will clean it up and make it run as smoothly as the main Google search page. It might not make me wince so much to use.

Just my opinion, of course. Your mileage may well vary.

Re:Will they do something about the bloat?

[gb506]

My mileage does indeed vary. I bought Urchin 5.x.x last week after doing a competitive analysis of the top contenders in the web analytics market. Urchin beat them all hands down in ver. 5 form, and version 6, which is in operation now as an on-demand service, will be out in software form in the next couple of months. The page overlay functions and goal tracking in 6 are the bee's knees and I cannot wait to use it.

And you talk about bloat? WebTrends 7 is a 245MB download. The entire Urchin install directory (for OSX) is 15MB decompressed. Hardly bloatware.

Bad news for Search Optimizers?

[miller60]

Google seems likely to make its Urchin-based tools available for free to its AdSense publishers and AdWords clients. Google's interest is in making ads more relevant, which in turn allows to to charge more for ads. That won't be happy news for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists who help site owners improve their visibility. If Google is offering user-friendly traffic analysis tools, are site owners likely to pay SEO firms? Some will, but this will make do-it-yourself search optimization much easier.